Posts Tagged ‘ iPad publishing ’

Inform and Entertain is Key to Success with Online Vid @4CornersTV.com

I just finished writing an article giving a progress report on the online video channel 4CornersTV.com for NetNewsCheck.com. We are off to a great start and I hope you find this information useful. For the full article go to NetNewsCheck.com.

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4CornersTV.com, launched in February by Ballantine Communications Inc, represents a new initiative for media companies to do what will be essential to their continued success; connect with new and younger audiences.

Knowing that a demographic of 30-45 year olds would not be engaged as strongly with traditional news formats, 4CornersTV.com was created to provide them content that both informs and entertains while being accessible to them in the formats they like at any time and on any device.

After more than three months of daily production with over 275 videos produced, there have been a number of significant things we have learned. The first, and likely the most important, is the relationship between content and audience engagement. Striking a balance between information and entertainment, with the latter being the most crucial, has been the most substantially effective way to boost traffic.

Since we made adjustments to programming, caused by a slowing growth rate in our targeted audience (according Google Analytics) we have seen a 63% growth in traffic, averaging 4% growth each week. 53% of audience is between the ages of 25-45. And 30% of our traffic is from mobile devices. Our audience values the enjoyment of 4CornersTV.com programming more than it does the information gathering.

This was very evident to us on an April Fools edition of our daily “news” program “The Local Roundup.” While the Roundup has a strong daily audience, consumers weren’t as prone to share or engage with it. So we decided to use April 1 as a test case in favoring entertainment over information, and produced a program filled entirely with fake news.

From federal controls on beer production (a taboo topic in our home state of Colorado) to piranhas in a local river, the fake-news allowed humor to shine through our traditional format. This resulted in the most watched episode of “The Local Roundup” to date, and led us to a more focused initiative to drive entertainment as a first priority of production.

This focus on entertainment has also been reflected in the topics we choose to cover. Generally, the episodes that more directly reflect aspects of the area’s lifestyle are most successful. Shows about mountain biking, rafting and other adventure sports are better received than more socially-focused news.

Home Page Overview[3]

One surprising development in the first three months of production was the more peripheral role of our newsrooms in 4CornersTV.com. Ballantine Communications owns several newspapers, including The Durango Herald and The Cortez Journal. Initially, we assumed that we would draw heavily on the expertise of those newsrooms for content creation on 4CornersTV.com.

In reality, this expertise was more frequently utilized in an advisory role. The newsroom has passed along ideas that better fit the audience and experience we are focused on at 4CornersTV.com. Our newsroom now plays more of a role as a source for material, as 4CornersTV.com staff writes their own material and depending on story also originates the content.

We have also spent extensive time examining how to maximize workflow for the resources we have available. We must strike a balance between the time it takes to find great stories with the time required to produce daily programming. This has made it essential to set aside time for production teams to sit down and look ahead.

The questions we found ourselves asking: What events are happening in the next month? Which is the right show and host for this story or that? Is there a way to make this more entertaining for our audience? Being intentional about the content and branding choices we make has enabled us to couple production and promotion effectively. We needed to follow the same approach as a company dedicated to video production. Our efforts with video were thus the primary intent as opposed to an add on video to a news story.

The most impactful way 4CornersTV can build its brand and cultivate new audiences is through the addition of new programming and hosts. The first imperative is relatively straightforward. We determine the show we’d like to make, agree on a creative direction and outline the first collection of episodes.

Matching the talent with the program has proven to be a more involved process. Once a creative direction has been established for the show, the next consideration is finding the host that fits with that strategy. At 4CornersTV it starts with a casting call.

We look for hosts who seem natural on camera, even if slightly unpolished, but are able to convey an enthusiasm about the subjects they are covering. For example, once we understood that our show “In the Neighborhood” needed to be fun and fast paced with original content, we hired a host who was willing to have fun herself on camera when engaging the subject, such as letting the audience fly along with her on her first sky dive.

Flying HIGH in the Sky Hero Image[5]

Check out the rest of the article on NetNewsCheck.com. Enjoy.

 

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2014
07/10
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Publishing Strategies
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Tablet Publishing: What Magazines Can Teach

I recently wrote an article for NetNewsCheck.com on the topic tablet publishing and why it seems that magazines are more innovative in this area than newspapers.  I have included a portion of the article.  You can read the full article at NetNewsCheck.com.

Tablet computers have scaled faster than any computing device in history, and there’s no slowdown anytime soon. According to a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast, 121 million were sold in 2012 and the number could reach 190 million in 2013.

The top age demographic for purchasing tablets is 30-49-year-olds. Interestingly, almost as many 55-64 year olds are buying tablets as 18-24 year olds.

What are the daily reading activities on these tablets? According to BI Intelligence, 30-49-year-olds read news content on their tablets 38% of the time, spending 17% on books and 6% on magazines. The core age group for most newspapers, 50-64-year-olds, read news 43% of the time, followed by 17% on books and 6% on magazines.

Considering the relatively small amount of time tablet users spend on magazines, it is curious to observe what appears to be a higher level of innovation from magazines than from newspapers (perhaps driven by advertisers’ attraction to the form factor’s stunning visuals).

Many newspapers are currently pursuing mobile and tablet publishing by creating responsive design Web sites. This means that the exact same content displayed on a desktop website automatically re-formats to fit smaller (or bigger) screens such as tablet and smartphone screens.

From a cost perspective, it is the most efficient use of resources. Rather than developing a multitude of Web sites and/or apps for different screens and platforms, a publisher simply uses one code base. This also enables publishers to avoid Apple’s App Store and its submission guidelines as an added bonus.

Now compare that to what’s happening in the magazine world.

Among magazines’ old guard, the five largest publishers in the U.S. formed a joint venture and launched a start-up, Next Issue Media, with the specific aim to bring about innovation in the digital space.  Read rest of article at netnewscheck.com.

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2013
06/06
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Goodnight Peel. Lessons Learned.

The Peel Original Development Team

I’m pretty sure most of us have experienced at least one dramatic shift at a certain point in our careers.  One thing I have always prided myself on is reflection and willingness to learn from every major shift.  The most recent buyout of Freedom Communications and subsequent changes with senior leadership led to many strategy shifts and even total elimination of certain products.  One of the products discontinued was the iPad application called “The Peel”.  Those of you integrated into the process of developing The Peel are fully aware that its production was hard labor; countless hours of blood, sweat and tears.  Well maybe not blood but certainly the sweat and tears. However, those of us intimate with this product saw a light at the end of the tunnel, which we calculated to be about 2 years after its initial launch; we had projected 2 years just to get to break even on the profitability front. That investment period was abruptly ended – cut short by one year.  Its new owners failed to acknowledge the future of this product. So back to my original point: Anytime a major change takes place in my career, I need to reflect on the “why” and “what did we learn along the way” questions.  To give a proper response, I’ve written this post on the lessons learned from our experience with tablet publishing.

I’ll start with the reason that The Peel was eliminated: The new owners of Freedom stated that the focus of the company moving forward would be on subscribers and profitable products.  Seems reasonable for new owners to say.  The problem is that the premises of The Peel was to gain a new audience – to reach a much younger demographic than traditional newspapers. A demographic that is adverse to subscription-based models.  We were, in fact, creating a new way of publishing, using the iPad as the main vehicle; with more video, original content, local information and events than a typical news platform.  As I see it, if a newspaper’s main focus is on subscriptions and profitable products, it makes it very difficult to invest in creating new and different new sources of content.  Regardless of the decision, there were valuable lessons learned that I thought I would share. I know many of you are trying to figure out how to publish for a new audience, and how Mobile and/or Tablet can play a role.

The Good Stuff

  • We learned a key factor in attracting a younger audience was to brand the product with a unique name (non-replica of the newspaper), and play down any connection to its legacy brand.  We fought this battle constantly, both internally and externally.  It may be that your legacy brand is important for initial credibility, but not so much that your readers think it’s the exact same content that’s in your traditional print product.
  • Collaboration is very important with existing content sources, as the resources available from the legacy brand are vast. The large scope of news gathering and related content available for your product is critical to success, and therefore your relationships with legacy journalists are crucial.  We had a great rapport with the local content center; they loved that we were focused on expanding the audience.  They appreciated our role, which was to aggregate relevant content, and to design new elements that brought the content to life on the iPad. Our everyday decisions revolved around our target audience, not what was on the front page of the legacy newspaper or on the homepage of the legacy website.
  • Video must play a major role in the development of content.  Our most viewed stories were usually video-focused stories or features.  We created original series based on prep sports, behind-the-scenes insight into local entertainment, coverage of products & people from our local community and fashion trends.  We had 5 original content series, or “shows” as we called them, in The Peel, We aired the shows on consistent days each week, and we adopted a TV-like marketing effort.  Most of these TV/video products also became hits on The OC Register website.  However, we always kept original show programming exclusive to the iPad for 48 hours.
  • We inspired many other content businesses to follow our lead and produce content similar to The Peel.  We also showed the importance of hiring employees to work on these projects that came from entertainment, TV, production and design.
  • The key component of The Peel each day was the feature story.  The feature stories were brought life with written content, short videos, high-res images and interactive features created in HTML5.  In fact, our usage patterns would go off the charts when we had a rub & reveal HTML5 function in a feature story.
  • We ended up averaging around 5,000 “Uniques” per week and had over 125,000 downloads of the app.  “Time Spent” with the product averaged 13 minutes each time a person opened the app.

The Not So Good Stuff

  • We started out thinking the best thing we could do was to tie our publishing efforts into our existing content management system and workflow.  What a mistake.  Most legacy publishing systems start with a page-layout system that does not understand HTML5 or high-res images; we spent countless hours each day trying to make our desired functionality work within a system that didn’t want to accept it. We had wanted to focus all efforts around the needs and expectations of the end user, and not what the system would or would not do.  Sounds naive, but we missed many opportunities to grow upon content functionality due to being held back by the publishing system.
  • We should have developed more video and original content sooner.  We were so busy just trying to make our deadlines each day in the early stages, that we didn’t have time to collect data that would dictate what changes were needed.
  • The name change to “The Peel” (from its original name “OC Register Tablet app”) occurred when we had realized that most of the users of the iPad app were actually the same people who received the daily traditional print and website versions of the newspaper.  These readers were actually upset that they couldn’t find the stories from the web in the iPad app.  They were expecting an iPad rendition of the website and print products.  We quickly made a strategic shift away from the flagship brand, and what a difference it made. However, again a little late.  It’s not always easy being on the edge of new technology.
  • We should have created a Sunday edition of The Peel.  We were so focused on the Monday through Saturday readers, that we didn’t realize the Sunday users want a similar experience.  We were thinking Sunday was a time when people would slow down and take a look at the printed newspaper.  In fact, what really occurred was that our younger readers were used to experiencing the Monday through Saturday editions, and were actually disrupted by not getting the same experience on Sundays. And, they were not users of our other products; therefore there was a gap in their daily flow of news.
  • Finally, sales and advertisers weren’t ready for this new medium’s type of analytics.  Selling “share-of-voice” was foreign to our sales reps and advertisers, who wanted to talk cpm based buys.  I’m not sure much progress could have been made in this realm, as we simply didn’t have enough scale to gain major sales.  We sold advertising to casinos, sporting goods and some retail, but nowhere else.  The ads that we created for these particular advertisers looked great on the iPad. It was impressive. In the end, we ended up with the budgeted sales we had hoped for, but those numbers didn’t create profits.  I truly believe that we could have been profitable based on our original 2-year timeline. However, with new ownership comes new expectations, and the investment period for The Peel was cut off a year before we could witness that success.

The knowledge gained from this experience has allowed me to become an industry expert in Mobile and Tablet publishing, but boy did it come with some bumps and bruises.  I believe the future is bright for products designed to engage and deliver what a user expects from the device they are using.  I am a strong advocate of creating or publishing around audience expectations, and not trying to repurpose traditional newspaper content to fit the screen of the device.  I hope this post allows others to learn from my experiences and win the pursuit of new audiences by utilizing a new and different way of thinking and publishing.

2012
09/04
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Publishing Strategies
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Publishing for Mobile and Tablets, Why Does It Have To Be So Hard?

My Interactive team has been driving the mobile strategy for the company since 2007, launching hundreds of mobile apps, mobile websites and iPad apps. Those products have been revised over the years, but it’s become clear lately that we need to take our approach to mobile to the next level.

Over the past few months, we have been putting the final touches on a next-generation mobile and tablet apps strategy. We used user data as well as analytics data for our mobile websites, apps and iPad products.

Generally speaking, our news apps have been fairly easy to maintain since they are RSS feeds into a template design. iPad publishing on our “The Peel” app, however, is a different story.  The Peel features a combination of curated and original content.  The process to upload this original content is time-intensive. We have to manually work with each story to create a uniquely interactive experience for iPad consumers that expect dynamic functionality.

As we considered our next generation of products, it was apparent that we needed to improve on the user experience and increase our speed to market (improving on productivity with the backend content management system).  With 2 years of trials and tribulations under our belt, I can certainly say that our strategy for content, design creativity and innovation clearly outweighs our ability to deliver at a desired speed-to-market using the current legacy systems we have in place.

Advertisers expect a unique and compelling experience on mobile and tablets, as do consumers.  But how do we meet these needs when we continue to pull from existing legacy content production systems with ever increasing limitations? Example of limitations: Photo & video resolutions in existing systems don’t take advantage of hi-resolution retina display on an iPad. News stories are currently laid out to fit desktop or printed page, not mobile or tablet, and HTML5 is a foreign language to most.

The answer? Bite-the-bullet! Recognize that if you want to succeed you MUST publish for the future and think about investing in non-legacy products.  Easy enough? Not so much. More issues are arising with each upgrade of smart phone and tablet operating systems. Not easy to stay ahead of the technology curve when newspapers are inherently print-oriented.

Rahul Patel wrote Are Publishers Failing on Tablets:  “Tablet readers expect the best of both worlds.  They want real-time content and web-like interactivity within a user-friendly brand experience that “feels” like the same brand found on the web and in print.” This comment is more focused on magazines but the basic premise is correct for newspapers as well.

So, how can legacy media businesses evolve with technology?  Well, this is our attempt at it:

1)   We focused on the desired design layout.

2)   We decided how often we wanted to publish new content.

3)   We focused on how we could deliver original content that took advantage of HTML5 elements to bring the information to life.

4)   We looked carefully at how smart phone design and functionality differed from tablet design and functionality.

5)   We created our next-generation layout, and assumed it would last about 12 months.

6)   We also asked ourselves “How do we continually feed this beast”?  After all, we had been going on the assumption that we could continue with our legacy systems…

7)   CMS (Onset) & our publishing system (CCI) provide what we need to publish, however the process is labor-intensive, and this production process gets heavier as technology progresses faster and faster! We are just adding to the production time each day as we pursue the best possible experience for our audience.

It’s now time for us to rethink another next-generation process, as we must free ourselves from the current time-intensive workflow environment.  A publishing system and or process should not drive what you deliver to your audience.  That’s the job of the audience.

The Interactive ‘think-tank’ has devised a system where any CMS would feed into a “normalization engine” which would then put all content into its proper place.  The normalization engine would feed the templates automatically, therefore increasing the speed of production.  A dashboard would allow for manual manipulation of the content.  We could pull in HTML5 components, hi-res photos etc.  We could then push to any template we have in place regardless of the device.  Assuming success, we would now spend our time on the creativity of design and interactivity, changeable at your fingertips! This new process would break the heavy production cycle.  The content becomes ubiquitous and our time could be spent at the dashboard level making each interactive experience the best ever.

Not such an easy task… and the hardest part is foregoing the existing production system/workflow environment. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to deliver the experience expected in mobile and tablet publishing on a time-sensitive basis. The key to success is not allowing process or outdated publishing systems drive product.

Stay tuned, every day we learn more.

2012
06/13
CATEGORY
Publishing Strategies
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Publishing Content For A Device Does NOT Equal New Audience

I have been immersed in digital media for over 17 years. And, although the digital world has evolved at rapid speed most recently, my main goal has always stayed the same: deliver content when, where and how people want it. Then, monetize the content via advertisements, subscriptions and ecommerce.

Traditionally, media companies have a large database of content that meets the needs of one mass audience, and it’s no secret that most traditional newspaper organizations have a strong foothold in the 50+ age group.  The newspaper creates a piece of content, and then delivers that content on multiple platforms.  This is driven by a “let the brand do the work” mentality.

Here’s the problem. Building content for one mass audience doesn’t work anymore.  Placing the content on smartphones and tablets that is pulled directly from your print newspaper and website, doesn’t mean you will all of a sudden attract a new and younger audience that’s using these devices.

Younger audiences expect news and information built specifically around their likes and dislikes. More so, they expect it to be structured to meet the different digital platforms.

Let me give you an example from my own company.  When we moved existing web content to smart phones, we found it met the needs of our current print and web audience of 50+, yet we weren’t reaching a new and younger audience. The traditional newspaper subscribers want convenient access on smart phones to the exact same stories as in print and online – just shorter versions of those stories.

With the iPad project, we decided to take a completely different approach. We looked at design and content differently in an effort to reach a younger demographic, that we knew was extremely active on iPads. We weren’t trying to satisfy/grow the current traditional 50+ demographic that made up our print/website brand.

For the iPad app, we started with a design that was very graphical and that categorized information around typical interests of a 35-45 year old. We developed original content and we curated existing content to focus on providing entertaining information as well as news. We were developing content around a specific audience, rather than driving the effort around the specific device.

Early results have been positive.  We continue to build a new audience that is very different than the traditional newspaper reader.  Our iPad app users are more engaged, spending on average approximately 11 minutes for every visit.  They are heavy users in the evening, from 6-10pm.  The majority of users fall in the 25-45 age group.  At least 60% of the iPad app content is still being created by our existing ‘traditional’ content center, but a separate iPad production team is curating it.  Our original content offering, in addition to the curated content, has proven to be very successful at building a new and younger loyal audience.  However, must continue to grow this audience to a size that rivals our other online efforts, in order to call this a true success story.

This being said, we know it’s time to cater to the traditional newspaper audience as well, as they too are purchasing iPads and consuming news on them. We’ll give this audience what they want by providing  a format similar to the structure of a news focused product.  It will still take advantage of the technology but in a fashion that is consistent with expected content for the traditional audience.  Call it an interactive newspaper.

In the end, when looking at the early successes of our current iPad app product, we’ve learned our challenges go beyond apps and devices when delivering news to reach new audiences.  We can’t build one content database and deliver it on multiple platforms. Whether its iPads, smartphones, online, or print, we must continue in our iPad app curated and original content mindset, by building content for specific audiences and specific platforms.

2012
02/06
CATEGORY
Publishing Strategies
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